The Tender Years

Donald and Sadie MacIntosh who emigrated West from PEI in Eastern Canada, spent nearly four years on the Alberta prairies where they gambled everything they had investing in two quarters of land to raise their precious wheat crop. Between dust storms, hailstorms, prairie fires, Black Blizzards the dreadful May 19 blizzard, and a difficult landlady, Donald and Sadie were beaten into submission. Loading their few possessions they moved north in a railroad boxcar to the bushland to face new challenges. Meanwhile their family is burgeoning. By the time they reach the Northern bush country they have eight children. The story comes from the memoirs of these children as they grew. The people they met and the conditions they lived with made living in the North memorable, heartbreaking, and sometimes frightening but there are tender moments and sometimes laughable moments. This is the second book in the trilogy following "The Gentle Gamblers." About the Lillian (MacIntosh) Ross was the fourteenth child of a family of fifteen born to Donald and Sadie MacIntosh. She graduated from Sangudo High School and went on to get her Bachelor of Education at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Literature courses taken there inspired her to become an author. However, it was not until she retired from teaching, married Reg Ross from the oilfields, and raised two sons, Lonnie and Erin, that she finally made her trilogy of historical novels of pioneer adventure a reality. As well as writing, she enjoyed playing the guitar and singing in a band with her husband who has since passed away.